In comparison to the top correlating factors in the Finance Industry being:

Content relevance and core topic.

File size and page load time.

The number of AdSense/AdLinks (less is more).

URL length.

So does this mean that internal linking structures aren’t important in the Finance Industry and shouldn’t be a key part of your SEO strategy?

No, it doesn’t.

While studies like this are great, they only cover quantifiable elements that can be easily measured across a large sample of websites.

They don’t take into account more objective and subjective factors, such as brand and offline presence.

These do however show the different approach taking in each vertical, and this is majorly influenced by business model and product type.

You’d expect a travel website to contain a large number of images and contain lots of guides talking about destinations with persuasive copy.

Whereas from a financial website or bank, you’d expect non-verbose copy that’s straight to the point with the information the user needs.

Some Things Are Universal

Correlating factors aside, some elements of organic search (within Google) are universal and should really be seen as basics across all websites, with strategy then being overlaid on top. These are:

Site Speed

Important for SEO and site usability. Not so much a problem today, given the increased spotlight that Google gave site speed in previous years, making it a staple part of the SEO auditing process.

The majority of websites also now run behind CDNs that allow for things such as JS/CSS and HTML compression.

Given the focus of site speed in general marketing articles, more website owners who may not be as technically savvy are more aware of its importance – and the same can also be said of HTTPS.

JavaScript Rendering

If you run a JavaScript website, it needs to either use dynamic rendering or server-side rendering.

It’s also important to consider the differences between the HTML response and the rendered response, and have a non-JS fallback solution in place if possible as this can affect:

Website crawlability.

New URL discovery.

New URL indexing.

Sitebulb is one of a number of tools that can highlight JavaScript issues.

Machine Learning the Web Corpus

Whenever I’m talking about comparing two or more websites, I refer back to a Moz Whiteboard Friday from 2016. It looks at how Google may (or may not) interpret and evaluate the value of your content in comparison to the wider web corpus.

Although the video and transcript don’t directly mention machine learning and Google’s artificial intelligence, Rand Fishkin did talk about how Google assesses the web corpus and takes learnings from it – using the example of granola bars.

Moz Whiteboard Friday, April 1, 2016

This is were approaches and strategies between competing websites tend to overlap.

In the example, when Google is assessing the quality of a page talking about granola bars, it’s looking at the web corpus for information and typically, you’d find pages containing nutritional value tables and lists of ingredients and allergens.

From this, they would see keywords such as [calories], [fats], [sugars], and then differentiating keywords such as [organic] and [vegan].

Applying this to another vertical such as travel, a page targeting [italy tours] may also talk about [rome coliseum], [milan], [venice], or [pompeii].

If Google finds 100 websites with a page targeting [italy tours], and 87 of the 100 contain a group of related topics and keywords and 13 don’t, machine learning (and logic) will go with the more consistent corpus.

This is also when you break away from just looking at single pages in silo, and start looking at:

Because Google is aware of what the web corpus is saying, you need to be in line with this and then develop the strategy to go one better – not just mirror what Google already sees as being rank worthy.

Optimizing for Your Business Model

It’s important that you use the right strategies for your business model and target user base – taking into consideration your competitive space.

While some technical elements of SEO are universal, it’s not possible to blindly imitate strategies between websites and expect the same results.